


Birds of a feather...

by soulofaminaanima



Series: birds of a feather [1]
Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gallifreyans have wings, Multi, Wingfic, Wings!AU, alien customs involving wings, they change colour with regenerations, winged!doctor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-19
Updated: 2020-07-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:40:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25386946
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulofaminaanima/pseuds/soulofaminaanima
Summary: Gallifreyans have wings like angels, but the colours and patterns change with each regeneration. Also, there might be some weird social rules surrounding the wings and feathers the Doctor never mentions, so the Fam have to figure that one out on their own.((SPOILERS: the custom is that Gallifreyans give their feathers to others to show (platonic) affection  instead of voicing this out loud. Also, a certain Doctor might get possessive if a certain Master offers a human companion a feather.))
Relationships: Metacrisis Tenth Doctor/Rose Tyler, The Doctor & Various Companions, Thirteenth Doctor/Yasmin Khan
Series: birds of a feather [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1909840
Comments: 12
Kudos: 78





	Birds of a feather...

**Author's Note:**

> @gallifeathers on tumblr inspired this one and I really wanted to write it. I’m not even finished with watching this series?? Haven’t read a lot of fic either, so this could already exist out there. Send me a link if it does, bc I want to read more of this trope!
> 
> Not Beta-read. English is not my first language, feedback is welcome. I do not own Doctor Who or any related characters.

The yellow feathers came as a shock.

The Doctor didn’t have them that first night they all met her. No, their shock came later with a Ryan yelling and pointing at their Doctor and suddenly Yaz could see them too. The pair of golden-yellow wings resting on the back of their friend.

The wings are big and she can’t understand where they came from. They poke through two cuts in the Doctor’s grey coat and probably go through her shirt too. Why hadn’t she seen them before?

“Perception filters,” the Doctor prompts, “they keep you from noticing them, but the effect wears off after a while. It seems like you lot finally saw through it.”

Yaz can’t fully read the Doctor. Was she annoyed they saw through her technology? Proud? Sad? The wings stay very quiet, flat and taut against the Doctor’s back. Is she afraid that the wings will scare them?

She could totally understand why someone would want to hide wings away: they aren’t exactly discrete. In fact, they were bloody distracting and Yaz has difficulty taking her eyes of them that first morning.

Ryan and Graham seem to have the same problem, so Yaz can only imagine what a fuzz the wings would create in the middle of a busy city like London. Humans and the like would stare and notice her too much. They would’ve noticed and known about an yellow winged angel showing up throughout history by now too.

The fact that Earth doesn’t, means that the wings are, in a way, a secret. A secret only those that have actually travelled with the Doctor know about.

_\---_

_Although it takes her eyes a while to catch the filter trick and see them, Bill likes the wings a lot. An angel professor from space, with his silver, grey hair and wings to match. He sticks a feather in her regency hat and Bill takes it as an offer to keep it._

_She carries a smaller silver grey feather in her back pocket when she starts travelling with Heather. It stays there until it’s all crumpled and a little bent. Heather buys her a glass photo case where they place the feather, as a promise. A promise to never forget him._

_\---_

The wings are absolutely stunning, though. The Doctor shows them off for her companions that first morning. Spreading the wings out and moving them about for a bit. She actually seems to be in a talking mood and explains how they are a thing of her species. That every set is unique and would never be repeated again. That they might contain the strangest colours or patterns.

The information about the Doctor belonging to an actual alien species is new, but Yaz files that away for a later date. Getting used to the magnificent wings is priority number one right now. The yellow feathers are a fairly simple colour, but sometimes they shimmer like gold in the lights from the TARDIS control panel. It makes them look ethereal.

The Doctor hands over a loose feather to Yaz and the human concludes that, aside from the golden glow, the feathers best represent those of a yellow canary. Not that she voices this out loud, though. 

Ryan and Graham receive their own feathers too, after the Doctor returns from her room with some older spares she ‘kept lying around’.

Graham calls them the weirdest souvenir they’ve collected so far in their space travels. The Doctor smiles and begins chattering at high speed about some planet named Shan Shen where they have the most amazing souvenirs. Yaz and Ryan smile at each other and Yaz wonders if he’s also thinking about little singing birds.

_\---_

_Clara keeps two different sets of feathers around. The soft brown feathers with small red stripes that always clashed with his fez, and the grey ones with silver streaks that complimented his hair. The flittering sparrow and the grumpy old owl._

_The first few feathers, she nicks off the floor from the TARDIS and she feels like she has to hide them away. He’d probably find it weird that she wants to keep them, so she hides them in a bag. It doesn’t take long though, for extra feathers to appear in the bag without her putting them there._

_\---_

Yaz thought that, for however beautiful the wings were, they were also entirely rubbish at being actually useful.

Sure, the wings had saved them when they had to take the fast route off an alien infested tower, or any other high spaces they need to escape from. The wings were strong enough to carry the Doctor and one companion at the time away to safety.

Flying looks more like some kind of graceless skydive towards the ground. It was absolutely terrifying too. They had nothing to hold onto but clothing and the bony shoulders of their Doctor. All three of them yelled all the way down. And landing was even more difficult. They were all very lucky nobody twisted an ankle, but at least they hadn’t died, so Yaz could call that a win.

Then, the Doctor sometimes used the wings in battles, if you could call the skirmishes they got themselves into that. She would take down their enemies by sweeping low and tackling them at the knees. Another tactic was suddenly turning off the perception filters and scaring unknowing humans with the yellow feathers. 

There were probably more deadly ways she could use the wings too, but she never did. Ryan mentiones these vultures he’d seen in a nature documentary; the birds would drop bones from great hights and eat the bone marrow from within the splintered and broken remnants.

Yaz imagined the Doctor just… accidentally dropping them mid-flight and shuddered.

_\----_

_The Pond house is literally littered with feathers. Rory’s sure the Doctor puts them there when they aren’t looking. The first feather the Doctor gave to him in person, was the small one he offered before leaving a Roman soldier to defend the Pandorica’s box._

_Little Amy owns a small clutch of feathers that don’t match any of the local birds. That’s because they came from a raggedy man shedding them in her kitchen. They help her a lot. To know the man was real and not an imaginary friend she hallucinated._

_\---_

Another problem the wings create is the fact that even though the perception filters keep most humans and aliens from seeing them, they’re still there. People could still bump into them, or notice them in another way. Would they show up on infrared scans?

And above all, they still leave behind loose feathers. Little yellow plumose that ‘falls out of her coat’ and stays behind on different planets, or in different time periods.

It takes a few days for Yaz to notice them, but now that she can see the wings themselves, the loose feathers are easier to spot and identify. From the Doctor’s behaviour, Yaz can also conclude that their friend doesn’t want her feathers just lying about.

The Doctor would crouch low and pretend to scan something, but Yaz can see her picking up a fallen feather. She’d then swiftly pocket the yellow thing away, all the while continuing her explanation of something science-y.

So Yaz and the others start silently pocketing the feathers whenever they see one whirling to the ground. Yaz politely leaves the collected feathers in the TARDIS, but she knows that Ryan keeps them sometimes. She’s not so sure about Graham, but then again, the older man isn’t as fast with spotting them either.

If they would turn this into a competition Graham would definitely loose. Ryan would win, but only because he’s the only one to actually collect a primary feather. The big ones are less likely to get loose, so Yaz has to concede that they would count as double points or something. Yaz would definitely win if she could count the feathers the Doctor has handed her personally too.

The Doctor explains one evening that there are humans on Earth that are _very_ interested in her feathers. That she doesn’t mind leaving them behind, as long as she’s sure nobody dangerous gets a hand on them. “The grey feathers were less obvious and easier to get rid of, so with these new yellow ones I just have to pick up the pace a little bit.”

Yaz doesn’t understand a lot about alien wings, nor the alien attached to them.

_\---_

_Donna compares his wings to those of a chicken, just to rile him up. A chicken that hands feathers to her, the Ood and Agatha Christie. But they’re also big and warm and he wraps them around her after he returns from Midnight. They shield her like an eagle shields its nest. Do they have eagles in space? She forgets to ask him and then she does not remember the wings at all._

_Her granddad now keeps the most beautiful feathers she has ever seen in his room. He hides them away in his telescope case, like they’re his most prized possession._

_\---_

Another useless thing about the wings: there might be some social rules surrounding the wings that the three humans are not aware of.

They’ve all noticed the ways the Doctor uses the wings to display emotions already. How she flutters them like a small sparrow whenever she’s happy. That she puffs them like a pigeon whenever she’s either cold or acting fake insulted. That they can spot her weariness in the slumped wings and the tips that seem to drag over the floor. Maybe the Doctor shows more true emotions with the body language in her wings than she wants to.

But sometimes the Doctor just … stills and draws her wings very close to her back and Yaz has yet to figure out what this means. Like any good officer, she can spot a pattern, so she watches the Doctor and their surroundings whenever this happens.

Sometimes it’s the questions they ask _(can we visit your planet?),_ sometimes it’s the things they say _(Graham claiming he’s getting too old for adventures)_ and sometimes it’s just simply them standing too close to her _(Ryan hugging her, Graham throwing an arm over her shoulder, Yaz trying to hold her hand)._ Maybe it’s an alien thing, but the Doctor never explains it.

Yaz wants to ask the Doctor so many things; where are you from, are you alone out there, why don’t you talk about things, why did you come to Earth? She wants to ask so many questions, but they never come up and whenever it do, the wings clamp up again and the Doctor changes the subject.

But then they’re on a plane with a bomb and agent O who isn’t an human spy at all. And the Doctor’s wings grow taut and pull themselves flat against her back when O hands Yaz a single feather.

It’s black with some white dusting around the tips and, even though Yaz doesn’t recognise it, it could be from any kind of bird on Earth. But since they’re travelling with a winged alien, no feather is _just_ a feather.

O looks at her with a slightly manic glint in his eyes as Yaz takes the feather, too dumbstruck to fully understand. Who is this man? What’s happening? She looks at their Doctor for an explanation, but she’s still looking too shocked to explain. Not likely that the Doctor would tell them, anyway. 

And that’s the thing with wings and why they’re useless.

Because, apparently, there are some weird rules about them that come up in the most stupid situations: they’re in a crashing plane with dangerous aliens made out of pure light, with a bloke who’s orchestrated this whole trap for them and all their Doctor can do is stare angrily at the feather in Yaz’ hands.

_\---_

_The golden specks that adorn his wings look like constellations. Martha knows because human John Smith still leaves feathers all around his room and Martha keeps them. On her breaks, she places them on the floor of the TARDIS and soon she has enough to make her own set, just like Icarus._

_But unlike Icarus, she keeps her distance from the sun. He lets her keep the feathers when she leaves and she hides them while working with Unit, knowing that people would do anything to get their hands on Time Lord feathers. Much later, her and Mickey’s kids adore them._

_\---_

When everything is over and they’ve all returned to the TARDIS once more, Yaz knocks on the door with the little engraving saying ‘DOCTORS NEST - STAY OUT’. It reminds her a lot of the signs she put up as a child on her own bedroom door.

The Doctor calls for her to enter and Yaz has her first look of the ‘nest’ where the Doctor must sleep in at night.

The nest isn’t what she expected it to be. For starters, it’s not made from twigs and branches, but from ropes. Soft ropes weaving an intricate pattern and creating a hanging basket the size of a small bed in the middle of the otherwise empty room. It looks a lot like one of those crow’s nest swings from a playground, but this one is filled with pillows and blankets. And feathers.

Feathers in all kinds of colours: black, brown, white, soft blue, green, more yellow and even purple. The bigger ones show patterns of blue eyes, red stripes or green flecks. The smaller ones make the whole nest look very soft to sleep in. So many different feathers, they cannot be from just her Doctor, right?

“Doctor, are there a lot of other winged aliens like you?” Yaz asks, wondering if the Doctor used to travel with others like her. Wondering if it would have been this ‘master’ she still hasn’t told them much about. Would it be something like birds, traveling in flocks? If so, where is her flock now?

The Doctor stills on her spot in the nest. “Why do you ask?” And Yaz reaches for a brown feather at the edge of the nest. She stops before touching it, not knowing if it’s impolite to.

“No, there aren’t.” The Doctor answers, “Aside from humans, I have been traveling alone for a long time now.” And somehow that answer seems more sad.

The Doctor pats the space next to her and Yaz climbs into the nest. The Doctor moves so she can wrap a wing around her. Some of the ropes creak and they softly swing back and forth while Yaz settles next to her friend. She waits until the movements have stopped before she asks her next question. “Then where do these feathers come from?”

“They’re from me.” The Doctor answers chipper. She plucks the brown feather from the edge of the nest. Upon closer inspection, Yaz can see it’s covered in little golden specks, a lot like freckles. “Sometimes, I change a little bit and my wings will molt and create a new look for me.”

The Doctor hands her another feather, this one is striped grey and contains a single blue eye at the tip. It looks a lot like the ones of a peacock, but with a lighter and softer shade of blue. “These were the ones I had before the yellow ones, and these…” the Doctor reaches behind her to grab another primary, “-were the ones I wore before _that_. The little stripes matched well with the bowtie and suspenders.”

This one is another striped one, but the colour scheme’s different: honeyed brown with reddish lines on one side. And then the Doctor just starts handing over different coloured feathers to her, offering little titbits of stories along the way:

How the freckled golden ones had gotten her into trouble with something called The Family. That she had worn the black-and-white-with-purple-glow ones for less than a year before changing again. When the complete white ones had led people to believe she was an actual angel on several occasions. That she wishes to have some ginger in the mix, but it’s the only colour she’s never had. How the broken ones usually come from TARDIS crashes and the burnt ones are either from Pompeii or a dragon in Krakow.

_\---_

_Rose adores the black striped feathers and she adores the brown ones. She also adores the man attached to the wings. He starts offering feathers like they’re flowers. Maybe they are: a way of not saying things. Just like on the beach, just like with so many different instances where he couldn’t._

_The Doctor that stays with her, in the end, explains it to her. That a Gallifreyan doesn’t just give feathers to anyone. It doesn’t have to be something romantic, but it’s a way of showing affection all the same. Rose remembers all the feathers he ‘left lying around’ for her to find and smiles._

\---

Yaz looks at the small pile of feathers the Doctor has placed in her lap. They’re all so different and colourful.

The subject of their conversation drifts to different things; what should they do next? Is it safe to return to Earth? Yaz removes the feathers from her lap back to the nest, careful not to crumple them.

“You don’t want them?” the Doctor immediately asks with a pout. Yaz stares up as her friend presses the wings to her back in that unexplainable way again and Yaz finally gets it. The emotion that belongs to the tense, still wings.

It’s loneliness.

It’s a little bird, one of the last of it’s flock, who tries to reach out and make new connections like her life depends on it, but fears the rejection all the same. And Yaz wonders for how long the Doctor has lived like this, how many years. Aside from the wings, the Doctor looks human in most aspects, but that probably only means she’s very good at hiding the parts of her that don’t fit in on Earth.

She stares at the feathers still in her hands and makes a decision. “No, I’m sorry, I was just afraid to crumple them.” She takes the feathers back and smiles reassuringly. A smile the Doctor gladly returns.

It’s alright, Yaz thinks, I can wait until you’re ready to talk about it. In the meantime, the yellow gifts are more than enough to know what you want to say. 


End file.
